The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted today showing how to create custom field formatters in a Drupal 8 application. Custom formatters allow you to enhance the current functionality of objects in the application and extend them with additional functionality.

With the introduction of annotated plugins, a lot has changed in Drupal 8. We have a more streamlined approach to describing and discovering pieces of functionality that extend the core. Along with many other components, the former Field API (part of the larger and consolidated Entity API) is now based on plugins. In this tutorial we will go through defining a custom field formatter for an existing field (image). What we want to achieve is to make it possible to display an image with a small caption below it. This caption will be the title value assigned to the image if one exists.

They start with a new custom module, starting with just the YAML configuration. Then they help you create the field formatter as a plugin in the "Plugin/Field/FieldFormatter" namespace (code included). They explain how this code works and show how to add it as a hook to make it available to the template layer. Finally they show it in use and how it places the title value into the image caption in the result.

On DevShed today there's a new tutorial posted looking at how to customize your osCommerce site's title tags to make things a bit more meaningful.

If you use osCommerce for your site's e-commerce, and you're not happy with the quality or quantity of visitors your site receives, keep reading. Though osCommerce provides some excellent features, its weaknesses could be getting in the way of giving you the number of visitors and conversions you expect. Fortunately, there's a solution, hidden in something as simple as a title tag.

The trick is in editing two files - the main index and a product info page - to add in a bit of PHP at the top that pulls out the matching category information for the item and pushes that into the $title variable for output.

In a new article on PHPFreaks.com Brad Jacobs takes a look at creating a simple search of the information in your database. Their example will search a table containing article information (title, story content, etc).

The aim of this tutorial is to provide users with a basic layout and the logic behind creating a multiple field search in MySQL. As often time users tend to over do the search and add a lot of unnecessary code. By following and understanding this tutorial you should be able to implement this search into your own site and provide a nice and simple SQL Search of your own database. So roll up your sleeves and be prepared to get dirty.

Everything's provided for you - the SQL to build and fill the tables and the code to perform the search. They opted to go with LIKE statements in the where clause instead of using something like full-text searching. The former works for a lot of situations, but can get slower and slower the more rows there are in the table.

DevShed has a new tutorial posted today looking at two methods that you can use to sort the search results from your WordPress blog my title instead of by date - a bit of code and a plugin.

Sorting search results by post title in WordPress is often useful, if your website needs its entries to be sorted alphabetically. As a quick background, WordPress is the most popular open source, free blogging/CMS platform. However, the default search results are sorted by date, so there is no easy way to sort them alphabetically except to edit the core WordPress search functionally source code.

Here's the two options:

Updates to the Query.php file to change up the "order by" value to work for the post_title and ascending/descending sort orders

The Sort Search Results by Title plugin that lets you keep away from the WordPress source and change the results order with a drop-in plugin

New on the TotalPHP blog today is this article talking about reading RSS feeds with PHP (more specifically with SimpleXML).

PHP 5's ability to read XML files is fantastically easy to use. In the past it was possible but it required quite a bit of long winded code to get any where. PHP 5's SimpleXmlElement function makes working with XML a breeze, and with much less code too!

They include a script as an example - five lines to completely parse and pull the title and link information out of the remote RSS file. The example creates a SimpleXML object using the feed's URL and makes each element inside accessible as an object (that can be looped through and properties can be checked on).

In this new post to his blog Juozas Kaziukenas takes a look at one method for getting the information out of a remote page - parsing it with PHP and XPath (assuming the page is correctly formatted).

When I was writing about how I use web scraping, I was still hadn’t tried using Xpath (shame on me). [...] It turned out, that using Xpath is extremely easy, really. When you master it, you can do everything in seconds. Yes, you need to know how XML works and how to write correct Xpath queries (brief explanation of Xpath syntax is available at W3Schools), but hey - these topics are in 1st year of university.

He includes both some sample code (to fetch a titles and prices for cameras from bhphotovideo.com) and a link to a XPath checker you can use to ensure that your query is correctly formatted. It's good that he also includes a quick reminder about the ethical issue with web scraping - it could be considered stealing depending on where the information comes from and who is providing it.

Dave Dash has posted a quick hit for symfony framework users - how to dynamically adjust your page title at your whim.

A lot of the content on reviewsBy.us and other sites we make using symfony have dynamic content. We try to have our page titles reflect the content by prepending the name of the specific restaurant, document or menu item before the site name.

Their path to the prize is a method, prependTitle that's included in a class (myActions.class.php) and used via it's reference in the application's app.yml file.

Dave Dash has posted a quick hit for symfony framework users - how to dynamically adjust your page title at your whim.

A lot of the content on reviewsBy.us and other sites we make using symfony have dynamic content. We try to have our page titles reflect the content by prepending the name of the specific restaurant, document or menu item before the site name.

Their path to the prize is a method, prependTitle that's included in a class (myActions.class.php) and used via it's reference in the application's app.yml file.